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The Color Between the Hours
"The Color Between the Hours" speaks to romantic love flirting with disaster, loss beyond reason and crime (white collar and otherwise). Addressing the reader as "you," the work explores inner landscapes. Whether it is a woman contemplating her mother's fate while microwaving dinner, or a person working as a psychic because it's required to collect welfare, the poems embrace a reality that is unique and universal at the same time. In these poems, haunted individuals confront danger and occasionally the miraculous. Irony abounds, and last lines will often surprise the reader.
34 pages, Hardcover
Published December 8, 2023
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February 10, 2024
The Color Between the Hours
by Elizabeth Morse
ISBN 979-88838-419-0
Finishing Line Press
pp. 22
$17.99
Love and Loss: The Color Between the Hours by Elizabeth Morse
I have no need, I say. I can keep going
all night, thoughts buzzing into mirages.
The moon eggs me on.
That is just your trouble, the doctors say.
—“The Nail-Biting Cure”
If you have been waiting for a chapbook of surrealist poetry that speaks volumes about reality, search no more; you have found your answer in Elizabeth Morse’s The Color Between the Hours. Unlike most surrealist poetry, however, there is a strong emotional pull to Morse’s work. What we have here is a collection that speaks to love and loss, a bittersweet and personal accounting of what might have been and what could be.
This wry and knowing collection often has a satirical tone that does not condescend, but rather, invites the reader into the haunts of a lively imagination. From New York City welfare recipients being trained as telephone psychics (true!) to an oracle of lost cats to grandmother’s pearl-handled revolver, the range of Morse’s poetry is wonderfully surprising. But also here is an intimacy, a narrator who shares a love for the arcane but never leaves the reader alone. Come with me, the poet says.
Neon signs explode the night
with come-ons pointing to needs
I don't want to have.
I dream of highways to reach you,
maps of interweaving lines
leading to a paradise of gingerbread houses
that never belonged anywhere near here.
—“Blue Roads”
In The Color Between the Hours, we encounter a narrative voice that is consistently present. This voice befriends us and draws us into the poems’ environment. We become allies of the narrator as she leads us through relationships with lovers and their memories.
Under lofty ceilings, I think of your fierce brown eyes.
Together, we watch the thunder, our words gliding,
found, if just for an instant. I do not want to be
pried from your hands.
—“Steep Weather”
The poems in this chapbook, while not written in form, have a wonderful cadence that renders the narration unique and strong.
The city doesn't treat you well anymore.
Infidelities blink from every streetcorner.
It's time to learn to drive, even at fifty,
venturing out on the expressway,
away from oppressive rooms.
—“Expressway”
The line breaks and enjambments work:
Shadows on your face
tell me you have other lives,
lottery tickets bought in haste,
hidden in drawers, never checked.
Do you want to be twenty again,
head covered in coarse dark hair
like a werewolf’s? You were fiercer
and proud of it.
— “The Man I Knew Too Well”
Personal and imaginative, intelligent and quirky, The Color Between the Hours speaks of love and loss, of the real and surreal, of pain and joy. Let it speak to you.
Larissa Shmailo is the author of Dora / Lora.
by Elizabeth Morse
ISBN 979-88838-419-0
Finishing Line Press
pp. 22
$17.99
Love and Loss: The Color Between the Hours by Elizabeth Morse
I have no need, I say. I can keep going
all night, thoughts buzzing into mirages.
The moon eggs me on.
That is just your trouble, the doctors say.
—“The Nail-Biting Cure”
If you have been waiting for a chapbook of surrealist poetry that speaks volumes about reality, search no more; you have found your answer in Elizabeth Morse’s The Color Between the Hours. Unlike most surrealist poetry, however, there is a strong emotional pull to Morse’s work. What we have here is a collection that speaks to love and loss, a bittersweet and personal accounting of what might have been and what could be.
This wry and knowing collection often has a satirical tone that does not condescend, but rather, invites the reader into the haunts of a lively imagination. From New York City welfare recipients being trained as telephone psychics (true!) to an oracle of lost cats to grandmother’s pearl-handled revolver, the range of Morse’s poetry is wonderfully surprising. But also here is an intimacy, a narrator who shares a love for the arcane but never leaves the reader alone. Come with me, the poet says.
Neon signs explode the night
with come-ons pointing to needs
I don't want to have.
I dream of highways to reach you,
maps of interweaving lines
leading to a paradise of gingerbread houses
that never belonged anywhere near here.
—“Blue Roads”
In The Color Between the Hours, we encounter a narrative voice that is consistently present. This voice befriends us and draws us into the poems’ environment. We become allies of the narrator as she leads us through relationships with lovers and their memories.
Under lofty ceilings, I think of your fierce brown eyes.
Together, we watch the thunder, our words gliding,
found, if just for an instant. I do not want to be
pried from your hands.
—“Steep Weather”
The poems in this chapbook, while not written in form, have a wonderful cadence that renders the narration unique and strong.
The city doesn't treat you well anymore.
Infidelities blink from every streetcorner.
It's time to learn to drive, even at fifty,
venturing out on the expressway,
away from oppressive rooms.
—“Expressway”
The line breaks and enjambments work:
Shadows on your face
tell me you have other lives,
lottery tickets bought in haste,
hidden in drawers, never checked.
Do you want to be twenty again,
head covered in coarse dark hair
like a werewolf’s? You were fiercer
and proud of it.
— “The Man I Knew Too Well”
Personal and imaginative, intelligent and quirky, The Color Between the Hours speaks of love and loss, of the real and surreal, of pain and joy. Let it speak to you.
Larissa Shmailo is the author of Dora / Lora.
Displaying 1 of 1 review